itSIM is a small, dual-chip overlay that is physically placed atop a phone’s regular SIM card. Once there, theBitSIM turns that phone – even if it’s a “dumb” phone – into a Bitcoin wallet. It does so by submitting transactions to the Bitcoin network as encrypted text messages. The phone owner’s private key – stored in the BitSIM overlay – is unlocked with a PIN. Founder Leon-Gerard Vandenberg says that BitSIM “interposes SIM commands between the original SIM and the phone. So the phone thinks there’s a SIM there, and the original SIM thinks there’s a phone there – it’s a SIM port redirector for SIM commands.” BitSIM is privately raising funds for its first production run with a crowdsale through Seedco.in. They hope to have a product to ship by Christmas. Vandenberg recently said in an interview with Brave New Coin: “Anything running on top of the Bitcoin protocol is also within the reach of BitSIM users, such as Counterparty assets or via ChromaWallet. On a smartphone BitSIM would cooperate with theHIVE wallet and their full Hive app store as well, which expands services. So BitSIM is a platform [where] it will be possible for a BitSIM developer community …